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[Aran]

so I imagine it has picked up on an incorrect soft mutation

Not so much an incorrect mutation as an implied mutation - it would be correct in 'Dyna bechod' or 'Am bechod', so in an odd kind of way when someone says just 'Bechod' it's more of a contraction than an incorrect mutation...

[Sionned]

Interestingly, if you use the University of Wales online dictionary, bechod doesn't exist...

Indeed, every dictionary I have and every online translation site I have except BBC defaults to "pechod = sin" or doesn't find bechod at all. BBC is only slightly better, as it translates the word as "shame".

[hewrop]

"Let him who is without sin....." Sorry I was thinking of something else

[llanfairfach]

I've always thought that bechod must be a combination of words, eg: Be/What and Chod/... (well, although I've been working on it for the last couple of decades, that's as far as I've got, so the theory isn't really standing up ).

People around the Colwyn Bay area use choddy (with a Chimney CH) a lot. In some ways similar to bechod, but used more when there's a bit of a negative involved. If the cat has been trodden on, you'd cuddle the cat and say bechod, but it would be choddy that it's happened.

[Cer]

Oh, is that like, 'shoddy?'

[Aran]

People around the Colwyn Bay area use choddy (with a Chimney CH) a lot. In some ways similar to bechod, but used more when there's a bit of a negative involved. If the cat has been trodden on, you'd cuddle the cat and say bechod, but it would be choddy that it's happened.

Fascinating. More likely to be the other way round, though - 'pechod' is definitely the original word here, usually heard as 'bechod' (as mentioned above) and possibly then anglicised to 'choddy'? There are plenty of examples of that kind of anglicisation in the south, but I've never heard of one in the north before - really interesting, thanks for sharing...

[llanfairfach]

Oh, is that like, 'shoddy?'

Here we use shoddy to mean something is not very good. Shoddy workmanship/Shoddy goods. Who knows though, maybe in parts of England shoddy is indeed used as choddy is used in and around the Colwyn Bay area.

[llanfairfach]

People around the Colwyn Bay area use choddy (with a Chimney CH) a lot. In some ways similar to bechod, but used more when there's a bit of a negative involved. If the cat has been trodden on, you'd cuddle the cat and say bechod, but it would be choddy that it's happened.

Fascinating. More likely to be the other way round, though - 'pechod' is definitely the original word here, usually heard as 'bechod' (as mentioned above) and possibly then anglicised to 'choddy'? There are plenty of examples of that kind of anglicisation in the south, but I've never heard of one in the north before - really interesting, thanks for sharing...

So if pechod is sin, then it's easy to see how that could become the Anglicized choddy for the examples above. I could never really fully accept how bechod was sin, hence my assumption for many years that it was a contraction, but it's all clicked into place now .

[Cer]

Shoddy workmanship can also point toward shoddy treatment. Not too sure if that can easily swing toward a 'shoddy thing happening,' unless someone made it happen.

[hewrop]

This is what Wikipedia's offshoot says about shoddy but it sounds a bit woolly to me
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/shoddy
My OED gives the same likely origin but also refers to shoddy being small stones at a quarry.
Shod as in slipshod comes from "shoed" and refers to old or poor-quality shoes causing one to slip.